OOTB Support Tools addon for Alfresco Community

Yesterday I installed Order of The Bee support tools module for our Alfresco Community 5.1.e (201602GA), which is a very useful addon that provides additional administration, monitoring and profiling tools for Alfresco Community, similar to the Alfresco Support Tools addon for Alfresco Enterprise. It provides a set tools for monitoring active sessions such users connected to the repository or database pool connections, and system perfomance (CPU, JVM, number of threads). This is an essential monitoring information when things are not working properly in your Alfresco instance. There are other ways of monitoring Alfresco via Nagios or Java Melody plugins, probe (lambda psi), but the most interesting information is JMX based, which is an Enterprise feature. This addon fills this gap for Alfresco Community. It also allows an easy inspection of Alfresco properties (with searches), the access to Alfresco logs and the possibility of setting log4j loggers without restarting Alfresco service (which is also an essential part when debugging in Alfresco and also a JMX based feature of Alfresco Enterprise). Finally. it also provides additional tools for getting information about hot threads, thread dumps, caches, applied patches, schedule jobs, and even a transformation test suite.
Below you can find some screenshots of the addon:

The system performance page shows a live graph of the Memory and CPU usage. It may help you to monitor, assign and tune the JVM Heap memory properly, or to check a correct garbage collector behaviour. It helps when having Java out of memory problems too.

The active sessions allows to monitor people connected (you can even logoff them from the console), to check if the maximum pool for database is reached, or if database connections are not being closed.

The system information allows searching between all the variables set by default in Alfresco. This is very useful for checking Alfresco configurations. Note: This UI with JMX edition capabilities would be a great improvement of Alfresco Enterprise Administration Console or Alfresco Enterprise Support Tools.

Finally, it is possible to tail Alfresco log files and to download them for further inspection, in conjuction with the possibility of changing log4j loggers configuration without restarting Alfresco service.

Besides, Alfresco Share Administration Console provides two new features. First, a very useful dashlet administration for users, sites, and also a dedicated log4j settings page, in this case both for Alfresco repository and Alfresco Share.

Here you can find the project in github: 

• https://github.com/OrderOfTheBee/ootbee-support-tools

Other Links:

• http://www.zylk.net/es/web-2-0/blog/-/blogs/la-consola-de-admin-de-alfresco-ee-y-el-modulo-de-support-tools